inaugural edition<\/a> of FILM FEST KNOX, held November 9 through 12, was a success by all of our internal metrics, we owe much of that success to those earliest conversations, when we established the size and scope of year one (three full days, with enough programming to fill two screens), drafted a five-figure budget that Kim could submit for approval to Visit Knoxville\u2019s board and agreed on a clear division of labor. It\u2019s worth noting, I think, that while none of us on the core team had ever launched a film festival, we all brought decades of experience to our particular roles, including project management. Kim, Curt and their colleagues at Visit Knoxville run logistics for large events year-round, so they were well-equipped to select and implement a ticketing system, arrange travel, lead marketing and communications, coordinate with vendors, oversee print traffic and negotiate key relationships with local leaders. As a filmmaker and critic, respectively, Paul and I brought our programming taste and our experience attending dozens and dozens of festivals\u2014American and international, large and small\u2014along with the professional networks we\u2019ve built over the years, which proved invaluable when it came time to seek advice from veteran programmers, work with distributors and recruit filmmakers, jurors, critics and other industry professionals to the festival. In hindsight, I\u2019m glad that we spoke so transparently from the beginning about prioritizing travel, because the rising costs of flights for our 15 out-of-town guests certainly affected the final budget. Visit Knoxville was committed to the vision and made it work.<\/p>\nWith those goals in mind, we settled quickly on the idea of making FILM FEST KNOX an event that would showcase and advocate for personal and ambitious cinema made outside Los Angeles and New York City. American regional cinema has been a consistent focus of our programming at The Public Cinema, both in our ongoing Made in the U.S.A. series and in a sidebar program Paul curated for local experimental music festival Big Ears 2018, \u201cA Sense of Place: A Retrospective of American Regional Cinema, 1960\u20131989.\u201d That vague notion, \u201ca sense of place,\u201d became a useful guidepost for all of our programming. The International Currents section featured places like Bas Devos\u2019s Brussels in Here<\/i>; Rosine Mbakam\u2019s Douala, Cameroon, in Mambar Pierrette<\/i>; and Aki Kaurism\u00e4ki\u2019s Helsinki in Fallen Leaves<\/i>. Our small Revival section likewise kicked off with the North American premiere of a new restoration of Peter Kass\u2019s recently rediscovered curiosity, Time of the Heathen<\/i> (1961), shot in rural New York. We plan to make an annual tradition of screening an overlooked discovery as part of our commitment to expanding the broader understanding of regional cinema.<\/p>\n
The centerpiece of FILM FEST KNOX is a six-film American Regional Film Competition designed as a way to spotlight the diversity of work being made right now and also as an opportunity to bring 12 people (two per film; ideally, a director and producer) to town for an end-of-the-year networking event for regional filmmakers. We chose early November because it was an open spot on Knoxville\u2019s event calendar, gave us some distance from Indie Memphis and the Nashville Film Festival and would allow us to screen important 2023 films after their U.S. premieres at NYFF. But November is a long way from Sundance and South by Southwest, and we recognized that recruiting films and guests might be a challenge. As filmmaker Jim Cummings told us during an early strategy call, \u201cThe problem with year one of a festival is that no one knows yet what you are.\u201d<\/p>\n
To help give FILM FEST KNOX an identity\u2014or at least a hook for visiting filmmakers\u2014we turned to our presenting partner, Regal Entertainment, which has been headquartered in Knoxville since its founding. In our first conversations about the competition, Curt, Paul and I daydreamed about Regal giving a theatrical run to the winning film. To our delight, Regal suggested the idea themselves and even upped the stakes by offering an Oscar-qualifying run, which, according to the newest Academy guidelines, is \u201cseven days, consecutive or non-consecutive, in 10 of the top 50 U.S. markets no later than 45 days after the initial release.\u201d Friends in distribution cautioned us that they would be hesitant to turn over their rollout strategy to an exhibitor, so before announcing the prize or making our first invitations, we confirmed with Regal that details of the theatrical run would be negotiated with the winning team and with any distributor who becomes attached to the film. (Our eligibility requirement was that the competition films be undistributed at the time of invitation, while recognizing the likelihood that one or more might be acquired before the actual event, as was the case with Bob Byington\u2019s Lousy Carter<\/i>, now at Magnolia Pictures and set for a March release, and Gary Huggins\u2019s Kick Me<\/i>, which landed on VOD earlier than he\u2019d anticipated.)<\/p>\n
As artistic director, I took the lead on pre-screening 50 or 60 regional features before sharing two dozen of them with a selection committee that included programmers from Regal. (One hallmark of launching a fest in 2023: Although we\u2019d been on a dozen Zoom calls together, I didn\u2019t have my first face-to-face conversation with Debbie Pennie, Regal\u2019s Knoxville-based director of film for Northwest region and art\/independent film, until we ran into each other at TIFF, where we compared notes.) Our goal was to showcase six films that represent a variety of regions, genres and modes of production, and I\u2019m proud to say we pulled it off. The inaugural competition included An Evening Song (for three voices)<\/i>, Graham Swon\u2019s period piece shot in rural Iowa (winner of Best Director); Kick Me<\/i>, Gary Huggins\u2019s \u201cnightmare comedy\u201d shot in Kansas City; Lousy Carter<\/i>, Byington\u2019s latest Austin-based comedy; Mountains<\/i>, Monica Sorelle\u2019s immigrant tale shot in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami (winner of a Jury Prize for acting); Somewhere Quiet<\/i>, Olivia West Lloyd\u2019s psychological thriller shot on Cape Cod; and the Best Film winner, Peak Season<\/i>, a romance set in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, written and directed by Henry Loevner and Steven Kanter. We\u2019re all genuinely curious to see how the Regal run affects Peak Season<\/i>\u2019s distribution life. This is a new experiment for everyone involved.<\/p>\n
Like most regional festivals, FILM FEST KNOX was also designed to celebrate our local filmmaking talent and highlight the quality of work being made here. I\u2019m drafting this article the day after the death of Ross K. Bagwell, Sr., who in 1963 returned to Knoxville having worked for several years at NBC in New York City and Canada. Bagwell spent a decade at our local NBC affiliate before launching Bagwell Communications (later Cinetel), a television production company that ramped up operations in the 1980s to meet the growing demands of cable TV. Acquired in 1994 by Scripps Howard (later Scripps Networks Interactive), Cinetel evolved into HGTV and established Knoxville as a home base for large crews of skilled professionals. Bagwell\u2019s legacy lived on long after his retirement, as Knoxville remains one of the top producers of television programming in the country.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOur Made in Tennessee program included three strong features shot in Knoxville and\/or made by Knoxville-based filmmakers, along with one screening of short films produced throughout the state. Frankly, there are benefits to limiting the size of a program like Made in Tennessee. One of our guiding mantras in the early stages of planning was \u201cNo participation trophies.\u201d The three members of the committee that selected the short films were unanimous in arguing for one strong program rather than opting for two screenings of diluted quality.<\/p>\n
The same standards were applied to The Elev8or Pitch, FILM FEST KNOX\u2019s short-to-feature development program that evolved out of the Knoxville Film Festival\u2019s long-standing tradition of hosting shootout competitions. Rather than asking filmmaking teams to make a seven-minute film in seven days, The Elev8or Pitch gave teams two months to develop an eight-minute proof of concept for a feature film, along with a one-minute pitch for the project. Nineteen teams completed a film, all of which were screened at the festival, and the top eight were also given an opportunity to do a live pitch to the jury and participate in a five-minute question-and-answer session. The top three pitches were awarded cash prizes and, more important, will receive several months of mentoring, a free microbudget production workshop and script notes from established professionals, with the goal of guiding the teams through the next practical steps toward a first feature. In a wonderful bit of kismet, Paul had served several years earlier in a similar mentoring program through Oolite Arts in Miami, where he worked with Monica Sorelle and Robert Colom, who were there pitching their first feature, which would eventually become Mountains<\/i>. (Paul wasn\u2019t involved in the competition selection and remembered the connection after learning Mountains<\/i> had been invited.)<\/p>\n
In the early days of The Public Cinema experiment, when we were still considering forming a stand-alone nonprofit, we dug through the IRS Form 990s of long-established film societies and theaters around the country and found that, generally speaking, their income is split evenly between revenue (tickets, concessions and merchandise), public funding (recurring lines in city and state budgets, along with grants) and private philanthropy (tax-deductible memberships, annual and major gifts, and endowment earnings). The point being that new models for film exhibition and repertory programming can exist anywhere in America as long as cinema is understood by local leaders and the donor class as a public art\u2014as a cultural medium that improves the lives of taxpayers and the reputation of the city. If we\u2019re confident about the future of FILM FEST KNOX, it\u2019s because we founded it on the strong footings of healthy and sustainable partnerships. Mark your calendar for November 2024.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cWhat would you need from this event?\u201d That was among the first questions Paul Harrill and I asked when we were invited to meet with Visit Knoxville in December 2022 to discuss the possibility of launching a new film festival. Keith McDaniel, founder and longtime organizer of the Knoxville Film Festival, had announced that he was stepping away from the fest after leading it for nearly two decades, bringing it to an end. If all of us on the Zoom meeting agreed this was a project worth taking on, then we needed to plant our flag by issuing a press […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19644,"featured_media":123929,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_column":0},"categories":[3407,22113],"tags":[24544,24626],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/filmmakermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123923"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/filmmakermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/filmmakermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmmakermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19644"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmmakermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123923"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/filmmakermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":123930,"href":"https:\/\/filmmakermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123923\/revisions\/123930"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmmakermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/filmmakermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmmakermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmmakermagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}